Friday, January 19, 2018

Are You Old? Infirm? Then Kindly Disappear

Nancy Root

LITCHFIELD PARK, Ariz. — Nancy Root remembers when she vanished.

Not
the exact date, but the occasion: She went shopping for a mattress.
This was a few years ago. Because the mall was so big and her legs were
so weak, she used a wheelchair, which was new to her, and had a friend
push her.

Their
wait for service was unusually long, and later, as she used the
wheelchair more and more, she understood why. In the chair she became
invisible. In the chair she turned radioactive. People looked over her,
around her, through her. They withdrew. It was the craziest thing. She
had the same keen mind, the same quick wit. But most new acquaintances
didn’t notice, because most no longer bothered to.

She
told me all of this recently not in anger but in bafflement. Could I
explain why her infirmity and her age — she’s 82 — erase her? She has
her own theories. Maybe strangers worry that she’ll need something from
them. Maybe they see in her their worst fears about their own futures.

“Doctors’
offices are the worst,” she added, describing how receptionists address
whoever’s pushing her. “I’m not acknowledged. ‘Does this lady have an
appointment?’ ‘Does this lady have her medical card?’ They don’t allow
this lady to have a brain.”

But
it’s not just receptionists. It’s flight attendants. Movie-theater
employees. They make dismissive assumptions about people above a certain
age or below a certain level of physical competence. Or they simply
edit those people out of the frame.

I
met Nancy on a Baltic cruise in September, and I couldn’t edit her out
of the frame because she was smack in the middle of it, right in front
of me, asking smart questions and making even smarter observations. I
was one of five speakers giving lectures to a group of about 60
passengers, including her, who’d signed up for them. She traveled with
two younger friends who helped her negotiate the ship’s narrow
corridors.

But
after chatting extensively with the three of them at an initial
cocktail-hour reception in one of the lounges, I didn’t spot them at our
group’s subsequent social gatherings there. An email that she sent me
the following month solved that mystery. “On our cruise,” she wrote, “I again experienced
the uneasiness of people toward us ‘physically challenged’ types. Even
among our educated group, people ignored me.” So she parceled out her
exposure to them. She and her companions did their own thing.

The more I thought about her experience, the more I realized how widespread it undoubtedly is, and how cruel.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate
that more than two million Americans use wheelchairs for their daily
activities and 6.5 million depend on canes, crutches or walkers.

And
the country is getting grayer and grayer. There are roughly 50 million
Americans age 65 and older, representing about 15 percent of the
population. According to projections, there will be 98 million by 2060, representing nearly 25 percent.

Nancy’s
infirmity is unusual and goes back to when she was a 2-year-old in the
Pittsburgh area in the late 1930s. She had polio, though her parents,
knowing how ostracized children with the virus could be, kept that a
secret.

“They
destroyed all the evidence,” she said, “and they never told me.” Only
many decades after the fact did she figure out the truth, and only in
recent years did post-polio syndrome — a condition that afflicts many
childhood survivors of the disease — degrade her muscles to a point
where she was forced to use a cane, then a wheelchair.

Her
health was good for most of her life, as she attended Oberlin College,
married, had a daughter and went to work for the National Science
Foundation and then the Department of Agriculture, where she was an
analyst. Her career, she said, made her as conspicuous in her suburban
Washington neighborhood as she is invisible in other settings now. “It
was frowned upon,” she told me, noting that most of the other mothers
back then stayed home. “But I loved it.”

She
and her husband retired to the Phoenix suburb of Litchfield Park, where
she now lives alone in their three-bedroom apartment. About five years
ago, he felt a twinge on the treadmill and was found to have pancreatic
cancer. Three months later, he was dead.

That
sped her decline. Her arms grew feebler, her legs wobblier. Her pain
intensified. Vanity be damned, she wore one of those pendants to be
pressed if she fell. But she once forgot to put it on, tripped and lay
on the living-room floor from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m., when a housekeeper
happened to arrive. She recounted the episode to me in a tone of wonder
at life’s freaky occurrences and at our ability to get through them.
There wasn’t a scintilla of self-pity in her voice.

She
considers herself lucky because her daughter is nearby. She has all the
money that she needs. “I have my mind,” she said, “and I see where
others are losing theirs.” She reads for many hours every day.

Books
were a big topic for us when I visited her a few weeks ago. It
frustrates her that she has never finished “Ulysses” or “Finnegans
Wake.” We talked about politics, too. About Singapore, where she
traveled — with a wheelchair and helpers — about two years ago. About
her job with the Agriculture Department and how ethical and
underappreciated she always found farmers to be.

Two
nights in a row we went out for Italian food, and she insisted on using
her cane instead of her chair. She can do that if she takes a Percocet
just beforehand and reconciles herself to a snail’s pace. Toward the end
of the second night, after two glasses of wine apiece, we mulled the
vocabulary of her lot. I confessed that I cringed whenever she called
herself “crippled,” which she does, because she values directness and
has a streak of mischief in her.

“Well, ‘handicapped’ isn’t supposed to be O.K., and I’m not going to call myself ‘differently abled,’ ” she said. “You’re a writer. Give me a word.”

“What about ‘limited’?” I said. “We’re all limited in ways. You’re limited in a particular way.”

I
noticed that our server would stand closer to me than to Nancy and was
more voluble with me, even though she could see, if she looked, how
vibrant Nancy was.

Nancy
increasingly makes peace with such neglect but told me that an elderly,
infirm friend of hers has another approach. “She tells people to go to
hell,” Nancy said. “I need to take a course from her.”

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